Justinian Read online

  Cyrus suddenly seized my hands in his. "Emperor, have faith in me," he said. "When I sailed from Amastris, I had no idea how what I had seen might come to pass, you having suffered such cruel injuries at the hands of your foes. And here I meet you and find you"- he cast about for a word, and found one-"restored. Is it a miracle?"

  Gently, I touched my new nose. Flat, aye. Ugly, aye. A nose? Unquestionably. How to explain to a monk I had received it thanks to the arts of a little brown man who scoffed at the notion of Christ's being the Son of God, or even of there being but one God? I did not explain. If Cyrus wanted to reckon it a miracle, I would let him.

  "When do you intend to go back to Amastris?" I asked.

  "Go back?" He shook his head in puzzlement. "Emperor, I do not intend to go back. I aim to make myself a place here, and to aid you in recovering your throne in every way I can. Once that is done, I shall return to Romania, but not until then."

  If he spoke the truth, he easily passed the test I had set him. Over the next few days, I learned from longshoremen that he had indeed disembarked from a ship from Amastris. "He was an abbot there, I hear," one of them said, which explained how Cyrus had got permission from his superior to abandon his monastery for another, or rather that he had needed no one's permission. Oh, he might have asked his bishop, but then again, he might not have, too, abbots being largely autonomous within the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

  In Kherson, he lived as a monk among other monks. If taking orders when he had once given them troubled him, he showed no sign. He spoke more openly about my return to Constantinople than I did. Sometimes he did so within the hearing of Khazar soldiers. I saw how they glared. If he was an agent of the tudun's, either they did not know it or they made a better show of hypocrisy than I suspected to lie within the abilities of such barbarians. I was convinced.

  And so, little by little, was Myakes, who initially had distrusted Cyrus even more than I had. "He's the straight goods, Emperor," he said one day when we were drinking wine in a tavern. "I wouldn't have believed it, but he is. Nice to have a man of God who's on our side seven days a week."

  "Yes," I said, drawing the word out into a hiss. Kallinikos had been perfectly happy to work with me- and to bless Leontios in my placea160… and to bless Apsimaros in Leontios's place. If I regained the throne, no doubt he would bless me againa160… for a while.

  Barisbakourios and Stephen- I more often thought of him that way than as Salibas, Stephen being the good Greek name it was- walked into the tavern. They hurried over to the table where Myakes and I sat. "That monk of yours, Emperor, he's something!" Barisbakourios exclaimed. "You listen to him, the devils of hell already have Apsimaros on their forks, and they're toasting him over the fire." His eyes glowed. He was ready for anything, was Barisbakourios, the best of the handful who had rallied to my side in Kherson.

  "People were listening to Cyrus, too, and nodding at everything he said," Stephen added. Had his brother gone against me, I think he would have, too. Though lacking the spark of Barisbakourios, he was brave and- because his brother was- loyal. Not all can lead, and without followers a leader is no more than a voice that crieth in the wilderness.

  "Were any Khazars there?" I asked.

  "No, no Khazars, but a couple of the rich merchants' bodyguards were hanging around the edge of the crowd," Barisbakourios answered. "The longer they listened, the unhappier they got. They're afraid of Apsimaros, the fools."

  What they were afraid of was the wrath of the Roman Empire, which, even when the Empire was headed by a usurper so little Roman that he had to change his name to have one fit for putting on his nomismata, was nothing to be despised. I also took the bodyguards' unhappiness to mean that their masters would be unhappy when Cyrus's words were reported to them, and very possibly that the tudun would be unhappy, too. If he was, odds were that Cyrus truly did support me.

  My other choice in looking at Cyrus was to reckon that he sought to incite me to actions by which the Khazars or the rich merchants (whom I had not previously considered) could justify taking my head. The more I pondered that, the less likely it seemed. The merchants' reach did not extend to Amastris, whence Cyrus had indubitably come. And, if the Khazars intended taking my head, they could do it. They needed no justification: to the contrary. If they did do it, they had no need to fear the wrath of the Roman Empire: again, to the contrary. Apsimaros would shower them with presents on learning they had killed me.

  Which, by ineluctable logic, meant Cyrus was unlikely to be an agent, and likely in fact to have seen in the stars that I would indeed return in triumph to Constantinople. Which, in turn, meant- or probably meant- I could trust him. One thing an Emperor soon learns is that men he can truly trust are few and far between.

  Writing out the pathway my reasoning followed takes longer than the reasoning itself did to pass through my mind. After taking only a couple of breaths, I raised my mug of wine in salute. "To Cyrus!" I said.

  "To Cyrus!" Myakes, Barisbakourios, and Stephen drank with me.

  ***

  Even with Cyrus vigorously espousing my cause, it advanced more slowly than I would have liked. Having spent so long in Kherson, I felt every added day like another heavy stone dropped onto my back. The first white hairs appeared in my beard while I spent time doing nothing in exile.

  Not all the time passed to no good purpose. The scabs crusting my forehead finally fell away, and the raw pink scar under them began to weather on being exposed to sun and air. A year having passed after the Indian cut me, the scar was no longer pink but a shade only a little paler than the rest of my skin. When I visited that brothel, none of the whores there hesitated to join with me during the day, and they no longer charged me twice the going rate. I was no longer so conspicuous as I had been.

  This was true of my physical appearance. In other ways, though, Cyrus's vigorous advocacy of me and my cause was making me more conspicuous than I had been. I was walking into Kherson early one morning when a couple of Khazars on ponies came trotting down toward the monastery where I had stayed so long. Recognizing me, they reined in. One of them said, "You come with us. The tudun is to see you now."

  I ended up walking into town between their horses. In all the time I had spent at Kherson, the tudun had never before honored me by inviting me into his residence: to do that would have been to acknowledge I was worthy of honor. Nor was he in truth honoring me now; it was more that I had become a nuisance to him.

  The building to which I was conveyed, while made from the local stone, had the spare lines that said it dated from the early days of the Roman Empire, perhaps from the first couple of hundred years after our Lord walked the earth as a man. I wondered if the governors the Emperors of those times had sent to this distant outpost of Roman soil reckoned their tenure here as much an exile as I did mine.

  The Khazars who had led me to the residence turned me over to the guards standing in front; the half-bored, half-alert demeanor of the latter put me in mind of the fellows who had stood outside my favorite brothel down through the years. Their boredom fell away, though, on their taking charge of me.

  Rather than doors, the tudun's residence had a carpet hanging over the entranceway, no doubt to imitate the tents to which the governor was more accustomed than he was to permanent housing. Inside, as I soon discovered, this imitation of the nomadic life continued. More carpets lay all over the floors, making my feet feel as if they were stepping on thick grass. Instead of the chairs and couches the Roman governors had used, cushions whose covers were as fantastically embroidered as the rugs did duty for furnishings. The lamps stank of butter.

  In lieu of a throne or other high seat, the tudun lolled atop a mound of cushions. I looked around, finding none provided for me. Having contemplated remaining upright so I could look down on him, I decided it were wiser to sit, he having a position I acknowledged and I possessing none to which he admitted.

  "You have friends making noises over you," he said ominously, "friends making noises about Em
peror. Merchants not like."

  He said nothing about the khagan of the Khazars, which I found interesting, but, if he was to govern the town, he had to pay attention to its prominent folk as well as to his distant master. I answered his first comment: "I am not responsible for what my friends say. They think I was treated unjustly." I thought the same, but again decided wisdom lay in keeping silent on that. Looking up at him, I went on, "Have any of your spies ever reported that I claimed I would go back to the imperial city and regain the crown?"

  He did not bother denying he had set spies on me. "They not say that, no." I breathed an invisible sigh of relief, for I had said it, but, evidently, only among men who genuinely backed my cause. His words also confirmed Cyrus's loyalty to me. Still, he held the power here, and I had trouble bearing up under his gaze. After a pause, he said, "But your friends, they say what you want, yes?"

  Yes indeed. "I cannot control what my friends say," I repeated. "Some say one thing, some say another, as is true of all men. But is it just to condemn me for words I cannot control? Would you want anyone to do that to you?"

  Those narrow eyes glinted. He jabbed a thumb at his chest. "I never want to be Emperor of Romans at Constantinople. Never."

  "Ah, but suppose your friends started saying you wanted to be khagan of the Khazars?" I shot back. "It would not be true. Would you want Ibouzeros Gliabanos to judge you from their loose talk?"

  "I never want to be khagan, either," he said, but that was not the point, and he was clever enough to realize it. From atop that mound of cushions, he stared down at me. At last, grudgingly, he said, "Maybe." He spoke to the guards in the language of the Khazars, which has always put me in mind of the noises an egg makes frying in a pan. Without a word to me, the guards gestured out toward the curtain. They did not follow on my departing. The tudun having finished with me, I was no longer of any interest to them.

  I reported my conversation with the Khazar governor to my comrades. Myakes, ever the most cautious of us, said, "We have to go easy for a while. If we get the Khazars and the merchants angry at us, we lose everything, and fast."

  "That's so, but there's such a thing as being too careful, too," Barisbakourios returned. He was ready to sail for Constantinople that day or any day, so long as the ship held him and me- and perhaps his brother as well, though I suspect he would have done without Stephen at a pinch.

  Cyrus said, "The truth of your right to rule, Emperor, is no less than the truth of the Lord. And, like the truth of the Lord, it must be proclaimed to those who know it not."

  "Sometimes the truth of the Lord is proclaimed loudly, sometimes quietly," I said. "As the Holy Scriptures say, to every thing there is a season. Now is our season for quiet ripening. When the harvest is ripe, we shall reap it."

  Cyrus and Barisbakourios protested but, recognizing me as Emperor of the Romans, recognized also that they were bound to obey me. And so, for the next few months, they were less vehement about putting forward my claim, regardless of how proper they knew it was. The tudun did not summon me again during that time, proving he was to some degree lulled.

  But what I had asked of my followers, however necessary it seemed, went against their grain and mine. Little by little, almost without knowing it, Cyrus and Barisbakourios once more began to speak of my returning to Constantinople and to the throne waiting there. Had the tudun sought to silence them when they first began this, I should have eased their eagerness again. But he did not, and so I did not.

  And so when, one day, Cyrus stood half preaching to, half haranguing, a crowd of lazy loafers who, like lazy loafers everywhere, took their entertainment where they could find it, he cried out, "In the eyes of God, this Apsimaros and Leontios before him were and are base usurpers, surely doomed to damnation and eternal torment at the clawed hands of Satan and his demons. Here before me stands the rightful Emperor of the Romans. Is it not so, Emperor Justinian?"

  I turned to the crowd and, as if seized by something more than myself, shouted in a great voice, "Yes, it is so, every word! I was and am and will be Emperor of the Romans, and will return to Constantinople to wear the crown once more!" How the loafers cheered!

  MYAKES

  How I wish he would've kept his mouth shut, Brother Elpidios! Yes, that means I was happy enough in Kherson. I had a place to sleep, I had work that wasn't too easy and wasn't too hard, either. I had plenty to eat. I had plenty to drink. If I wanted anything more, I had places where I could go. I didn't go to the same place Justinian used, but Kherson had plenty of them. Never known a town full of sailors that didn't.

  But that's not what I'm talking about, not this time. I wish Justinian would have kept his mouth shut because opening it drew notice to him that he didn't want. We'd been making plans, the lot of us. We knew what we wanted to do. We just weren't quite ready to do it yet- and doing it with people keeping an eye on us was ten times tougher than if we'd been able to go about our business with nobody the wiser.

  Justinian, though, he was never one for doing things by halves. What's that you say, Brother? You've seen as much? I hope you have, what with spending so much time reading his book to me. Holding back after the tudun warned him- it ate at him. He couldn't stand it, no matter how plain the need was.

  Afterwards, he felt better. He was all happy and smiling and lazy, like he'd just had a woman after doing without for a long time. What? You don't know what I'm talking about? Oh, that's right, so you don't, poor fellow. Well, you're a holy man, Brother Elpidios, and God loves you. That'sa160… very fine.

  But you lay a woman, you can get in trouble, too. It's not all fun. She can give you a drippy pipe. You can put a baby in her. Even if you don't put a baby in her, her brothers and her father are liable to find out you've spread her legs, and then come after you with clubs, or maybe knives.

  Say you've been bragging. That helps 'em find out. And when Justinian shouted out that he was the rightful Emperor and he aimed to get his crown back, if you wouldn't call that bragging, Brother Elipidios, what would you call it?

  JUSTINIAN

  Iwaited to see what the tudun would do after I proclaimed my intention of regaining that which I had inherited from my ancestors. What the tudun did, rather to my surprise, was nothing. Perhaps he was weaker than I had thought or than he had presented himself as being, or perhaps the khagan of the Khazars had sent him orders to moderate his treatment of me. I set Barisbakourios to investigate which of those was so.

  But the tudun was not the only power in Kherson, which, like any frontier town, was rife with alliances running in more than one direction. The older families there looked more strongly toward Constantinople than toward the Khazars. They may also have remembered that Apsimaros, before usurping the throne, had been an officer of the fleet, and so more inclined to use it than Le ontios would have been- not that Leontios was ever much inclined to do anything.

  I was spooning up the inevitable, inescapable salt-fish porridge in the xenodokheion one morning when Stephen burst in, all sweaty and disheveled. "Emperor!" he said. "They'll be coming for you, Emperor!"

  "Who will be coming for me?" I demanded, though I already had a fair idea. Myakes was eating beside me. He had been grumbling over my announcing I intended to retake the throne, and I did not care to give him the chance to look at me as if to say I told you so, even if he was too well trained in subordination to speak the words aloud.

  "The whole lot of the bastards," Stephen said, which, if imperfectly responsive, had more flavor than that porridge of mine. He went on, "They'll kill you if they catch you, or else send you back to Apsimaros."

  The prominent folk in Kherson could muster more force than I could hope to withstand. And, if by some chance they chose to give me over to Apsimaros rather than slaying me themselves, he would no doubt make up for their neglect in that matter.

  Myakes put down his spoon, brought the bowl from which he was eating to his lips, and gulped down what remained. "Might as well fill my belly," he remarked. "Lord knows when I'll g
et the chance again." That being full of homely good sense, I imitated his example.

  Stephen, meanwhile, was shifting from foot to foot, as if he intended running to the latrine at any moment. "Come on!" he exclaimed, the instant I put down my bowl. "My brother has horses waiting."

  I had hardly been on a horse since my exile. Kherson was not a city of such great extent as to make riding needful, shank's mare sufficing for all journeys thereabouts. But we could not stay in Kherson, not now. I sprang to my feet and followed Stephen out of the xenodokheion where I had lived for almost nine years. After that day, I never saw the place again.

  I should not even have looked back at it had Cyrus not chanced to come out of the monastery as I was trotting away and to call after me, "Where are you going, Emperor?"

  Stephen had not told me what Barisbakourios had in mind doing with the horses he had collected. But an answer came to my mind as readily as a sword might come to my hand: "We're going up toward the country of the Khazars." If the tudun had kept silent after my assertion of my rights, perhaps his master was indeed more inclined to friendliness toward me than he had been in the past. He could hardly have been less inclined to friendliness toward me than the local leaders of Kherson, not if they aimed to murder me or betray me to the usurper.

  "I'm with you, Emperor," Cyrus said, and came running after Stephen and Myakes and me.

  Had I been offered while ruling in Constantinople such a horse as one of the beasts Barisbakourios had waiting, I have no doubt I should have ordered a whipping for the wretch rash enough to insult me so. Any horse, however, was better than none, and these beasts qualified, if barely, as any horse. I mounted the least disreputable of them, and we rode by side streets toward the north gate of Kherson.